Flash Fiction #1

It was like any other rainy night in the world when Danny Smith began writing, he was frustrated that he couldn’t finish a story so he makes an extra effort to finish something in writing. Typing out a few notes holding details of his world was the easy part, the hard part is not hating your writing enough to get it done. His mind drifts back to the days he would read fanfiction made by writers more competent than him for the simple fact of actually posting something. It didn’t help that he would take forever to pick fanfiction to read. Danny despises his own work, perhaps a bit too much. He’s a beginner and yet he holds himself to the unreasonable standards he placed on writing. Danny tried making plots in an outline but he rarely sticks to it and maybe he doesn’t like making story outlines. Regardless Danny continued to write with nothing planned whatsoever, maybe it was better to write from the mind and not an outline. Danny would have made a cringe story anyways since he was a new writer so why not choose the method that seems most enjoyable. The writer’s term for this freeform writing style is typically called a pantser as in writing from the seat of their pants. He lacked creative ideas for writing both plots and characters, it seemed like no matter what he couldn’t create a good story or main character. It was 2:00 AM in the morning, or was it night? Anyhow, Danny looks for a prompt to practice his craft.

Danny decides to write a story about a human who goes to an all monsters school, it seemed like a perfect project but there was just one problem. Its been years since Danny when to school and he didn’t have many unique experiences about school to write from. He thought of making it a romance but again he lacked the experience to make it genuine. Then there was the problem of making characters, he didn’t really know how to write good characters, he struggled with problems like what to name them, what traits would make a good character, and even struggling to give them a character goal. Danny was also a procrastinating type who lazies about playing video games. Danny wanted to make things like a visual novel more than once but as of late, he avoided those types of projects as it’s much much harder to make a visual novel than a simple piece of flash fiction or short story. But maybe Danny can make a visual novel.

Another issue Danny faced was the choice of genre, Danny despite wanting to read didn’t have a whole lot to read aside from fanfiction. He tried making a superhero action story but quickly grew tired of the plot not going anywhere and trying to make a fantasy he quickly just described whole scenes worth of actions. Rather than having the characters act out the scenes, sure it was faster and saved him time but it felt like a waste of character moments.